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Notifications Research

The Do Not Disturb Challenge (CHI ’15)

Do Not Disturb Mode

Notifications are alerts intended to draw attention to new online content. Traditionally used in text messaging, email clients and desktop instant messengers, notifications are becoming used by all types of applications across all types of computing devices.

Today in 2015, we are still living in the ‘wild-west land-grab phase’ of notifications: more and more OSes introduce notification centers and more and more apps generate notifications. However, little is known about how the increasing number of notifications affect us.

Hence, in a collaboration between the Scientific Group of Telefonica R&D and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Luz Rello and I envisioned the Do Not Disturb Challenge. As part of challenge, participants disable notifications on their phones, tablets, and computers for a full day.

In December 2014, we rolled out a pilot of the Do Not Disturb Challenge with 12 participants. While participants reacted wildly different to the lack of notifications, for many, it was a strong experience.

The hugest impact was social. People have come to expect timely responses to their messages. Without notifications, many participants felt no longer able to meet these expectations. Some were informing others before the study that they would be less responsive, some kept constantly checking the phone.

At the same time, many participants noted that without the constant interruptions by notifications, they felt more focus, relaxed, and productive. Others realised that not all notifications are the same and deserve the same treatment. For example, many participants felt relieved by the absence of group-chat notifications.

Probably the main take-away so far is that people have very strong and polarized opinions towards (missing) notification alerts. The only consistent findings across the participants was that none of them would keep notifications disabled altogether. Notifications may affect people negatively, but they are essential: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

The results will be presented at CHI ’15: the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) to be held from April 18 – 23 in Seoul, South Korea.

Martin Pielot and Luz Rello
The Do Not Disturb Challenge – A Day Without Notifications
CHI EA ’15: Extended abstracts on Human factors in Computing Systems, 2015.

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Categories
Android Research

App Store Studies : How to Ask for Consent?

App Stores, such as Apple’s App Store or Google Play, provide researchers the opportunity to conduct experiments with a large number of participants. If we collect data during these experiments, it may be necessary to ask for the users’ consent beforehand. The way we ask for the users’ consent can be crucial, because nowadays people are very sensitive to data collection and potential privacy violations.

We conducted a study suggesting that a simple “Yes-No” form is the best choice for researchers.

Tested Consent Forms

We (most of the credit goes to Niels Henze for conducting the study) tested four different approaches to ask for the consent to collect non-personal data. All consent forms contain the following text:
By playing this game you participate in a study that investigates the touch performance on mobile phones. While you play we measure how you touch be we DON’T transmit personalized data. By playing you actively contribute to my PhD thesis.

Checkbox Unchecked

The first tested consent form showed an unchecked check next to a text reading “Send anonymous feedback”. In order to participate in the study a user had to tick the checkbox and then press the “Okay” button.

Checkbox Checked

The second consent form is the same as the previous one, except that the checkbox is pre-checked. To participate in the study the user has to merely click the “Okay” button.

Yes/No Button

The third consent form features two buttons are provided reading “Okay” and “Nope”. To participate the user has to click “Okay”. Clicking “Nope” will end the app immediately.

Okay Button

The foorth consent form only contains a single “Okay” Button. By clicking “Okay” the user participates in the study. To avoid participation, the user has to end the app through the phone’s “home” or “return” buttons.

Study

These consent forms were integrated into a game called Poke the Rabbit! by Niels Henze. At first start, the application randomly selected one of the four consent forms. If the use accepted to participate in the study, the app transmitted the type of the consent form to a server.

Results

We collected data from 3,934 installations. The diagram below shows the conversion rate. The conversion rate was estimated by dividing the number of participants per form by 983,5 (we assume perfect randomisation, i.e. each consent form was presented in 25% of the installations).

Conversion rate per consent form. The x-axis shows the type of consent form. The y-axis shows the estimated fraction of users that participated in the study after download.

We were surprised about the high conversion rate. Only the consent form with the unchecked checkbox yielded in a too low conversion rate.

Conclusions – use Yes/No Buttons

We suggest using the consent form with Yes-No buttons. The consent form with the checked checkbox may considered unethical, since the user may not have read the text and was not forced to consider unchecking the checkbox. The consent form with the “Okay” button may be considered unethical, too, because users may not be aware that they can avoid data collection by using the phone’s hardware buttons. The “Yes-No” form, in contrast, forces users to think about their choice and offer a clear way to avoid participating in the study.

Yes-No buttons are ethically safe and resulted in the second highest conversion rate.

Would you suggest otherwise? We are not at all saying that this is definite! Please share your opinion (comments or mail)!

More Information

This work has been published in the position paper App Stores – How to Ask Users for their Consent? The paper was presented at the ETHICS, LOGS and VIDEOTAPE Ethics in Large Scale Trials & User Generated Content Workshop. It took place at CHI ’11: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, which was held in May 2011 in Vancouver, Canada.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the European Commission, which has co-funded the IP HaptiMap (FP7-ICT-224675) and the NoE INTERMEDIA (FP6-IST-038419).

 

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Categories
Research

In Situ Field Studies using the Android Market

Recently, researchers have started to investigate using app distribution channels, such as Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market to bring the research to the users instead of bringing the users into the lab.

My colleague Niels, for example, used this approach to study how people interact with touch screens of mobile phones. But, instead of collecting touch events in a boring, repetitive task he developed a game where users have to burst bubbles by touching them. And instead of conducting this study in the sterile environment of a lab he published the game on the Android Market for free, so it was installed and used by hundreds of thousands of users. So, while these users were enjoying the game they generated millions of touch events. And unlike traditional lab studies, this data was collected from all over the world and many different contexts of use. The results of this study were reported at MobileHCI ’11 and were received enthusiastically.

Since my work is on pedestrian navigation systems & conveying navigation instructions on vibration feedback, lab studies are oftentimes not sufficient. Instead we have to go out and conduct our experiments in the field, e.g. by having people navigate through a busy city center.

So, if we can bring lab studies “into the wild” can we do the same with field experiments?

My colleague Benjamin and I started addressing this question in 2010. We developed a consumer-grade pedestrian navigation application called PocketNavigator and released on the Android Market for free. Then, we developed algorithms that allow us to infer specific usage patterns we were interested in. For example, these algorithms allow us to infer whether users follow the given navigation instructions or not. We also developed a system that allows the PocketNavigator to collect these usage patterns along with relevant context parameters and send these to one of our servers. On a side-note, the collected data does not contain personally identifiable information, so it does not allow us to identify, locate, or contact users.

With this setup we conducted a quasi-experiment. Since my research is about the effect of vibration feedback on navigation performance and the user’s level of distraction, we compared the usage patterns of situations where the vibration feedback was turned on versus turned off. Our results show that the vibration feedback was used in 29.9 % of the trips with no effect on the navigation performance. However, we found evidence that users interacted less with the touch screen, looked less often at the display, and turned off the screen more often. Hence, we believe that users were less distracted.

The full report of this work has been accepted to the prestigious ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12) and has been presented in May 2012 in Austin, Texas.

The paper can be downloaded from here.

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